The Week That Was

It has been a trying week.

First, I've been trying to break Gaz of a bad habit that I've allowed to run rampant for far too long. She always likes to hold onto the spare breast when she's nursing, and since this has never really bothered me, I let her. But it does make public nursing that much harder when she's used to doing things a certain way that involves me exposing more of myself than I really want to. So on Tuesday when she lifted up my entire shirt for her first-of-the-morning nursing session, I just decided that I had had enough. I clamped one hand over the spare breast and so began the battle of wills. I won, of course, but it took an hour and a half of her crying and me explaining and attempting to soothe for her to settle down enough to nurse. She's still testing me, but she's getting better. Sometimes I don't even have to cover the spare breast.

The side effect of this is that Gaz has been a bit more irritable than usual. Twice this week she's woken up from naps and cried hysterically for more than twenty minutes at a stretch, and after Wiggleworms this week she had a nice, long fit induced by the frustration of one little girl stealing her shaker and not getting to strum the guitar as much as she wanted.

But in amongst the unhappy moments have been some real gems. Tuesday I had a dentist appointment, and Mark met us up at the dentist's office to take over Gaz duties while I got cleaned and x-rayed (no cavities! hooray!). She really missed me and when we stopped for dinner afterward, she sat next to me and showered me with hugs and kisses when she wasn't trying to destroy my water glass.

On the way home from Michigan last weekend Gaz unleashed a new sentence on us: "I excited!" I hear it all the time now when I'm bringing food to the table or getting out a snack or settling in with her to nurse. She's also insistent about which side she nurses on, always asking for the "good one." The good one is never the same one twice, so that makes things hard to predict. But I'm loving the new depths to her vocabulary and expression.